James Wines (born 1932) is an American artist and architect associated with environmental design. Wines is founder and president of SITE,[5] a New York City -based architecture and environmental arts organization chartered in 1970.[6] This multi-disciplinary practice focuses on the design of buildings, public spaces, environmental art works, landscape designs, master plans, interiors and product design.[7] The main focus of his design work is on green issues and the integration of buildings with their surrounding contexts.

Wines is currently a professor of architecture at Penn State University. In addition to critical writing, he has lectured in fifty-two countries on green topics since 1969. In 1987, his book De-Architecture[8] was released by Rizzoli International Publications. There have been twenty two monographic books museum catalogues[9] have published his drawings, models and built works for SITE.[5] In total, Wines has designed more than 150 projects for private and municipal clients in eleven countries. He has won twenty-five writing and design awards including the 1995 Chrysler Design Award.[10]

Wines explicitly expresses his own "concern for the Earth." Having written at length on new modes of architecture, design, and planning:

The [20th] century began with architects being inspired by an emerging age of industry and technology. Everybody wanted to believe a building could somehow function like a combustion engine. As an inspirational force in 1910, one can understand it. But as a continuing inspiration in our post-industrial world, or our new world of information and ecology, it doesn't make any sense.

James Wines graduated from Syracuse University in 1956. He became a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome that year and was bestowed a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962. He began his career as a successful sculptor and graphic designer, exhibiting with the Otto Gerson Gallery (subsequently Marlborough Gallery) in New York.

Professor Wines’ corporate clients include Swatch, MCA Universal, MTV, Nickelodeon, Williwear, Isuzu, Disney, Costa Coffee, Carrabba's Restaurants, Saporiti Italia, Brinker International, Allsteel, Ranger Italia, Reliance Energy Corporation, and Denny's. Among municipal clients, he has worked for the cities of Hiroshima, Yokohama, Toyama, Seville, Vienna, Vancouver, Le Puy en Velay, Chattanooga, and New York City. His original drawings for these projects have graced the covers of dozens of international design magazines.

Professor Wines strongly advocates hand drawing as a key to conceptual processes, alongside computer-aided tools[12] “For most architects graphic representation is notional, technical, or illustrative and mainly used as an analytical tool to record design intentions. I consider drawing more as a way of exploring the physical and psychological state of inclusion, suggesting that buildings can be fragmentary and ambiguous, as opposed to conventionally functional and determinate.”[13]

SITE- Monograph on architecture and public spaces from 1970 to 2006 - text by Mario Pisani, Edilstampa Publishers, Italy 2006.

SITE - Identity and Density - monograph on architecture, public spaces, interiors, and product designs of SITE from 1969 to 2004 - foreword by Tom Wolfe, essays by Micheal McDonough, Micheal Crosbie and James Wines, Publishers: Sydney, Australia 2005.

Folio VII: The Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art - Monograph folio on SITE's competition entry for the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt, West Germany - Text by Herbert Muschamp with notes by J. Wines - The Architectural Association: London, England 1986

THE HIGHRISE OF HOMES - Catalogue to accompany a unique concept of high-rise architecture by SITE - Text by James Wines and Patricia Phillips - Rizzoli International Publications: New York, New York, USA 1982